I was out for dinner with a friend last week and we started discussing our life’s events. We met someone new at the place and through our conversation he posed a wonderful question. How do we know when we are living the good times? This question was so good, that we all just sat there, silent for a moment, trying to come up with some ideas for an answer. You know what? Not one of us came up with a good suggestion.

I started to think about what defines “a good time” in life. It’s starts by reviewing the events of your life. It can be by ages, relationships, jobs, living situations, whatever comes to mind. You will get an overall feeling for that period of time. It can be good, bad or just indifference. Once you have the overall feeling, look deeper at the reasons for the feeling. For example, if you were really happy in your 20’s, you might see that you had an active social life or you were traveling a lot. There will be details that make this period of time great. This theory works for the reverse also. If you were miserable, was it because you were unemployed or fighting with your spouse? You see my point.

Now, go a step further, take the details of the feeling of happiness and apply it to your current life. Do you see any similarities? In this way, we are able to identify good times as they are currently happening. What I found interesting about this experiment is that the details of my life that lead to happiness were very small moments, strung together. I wasn’t always in the perfect circumstances, but daily or weekly there were little moments of joy that became a chain of happiness. ♥

Perform your own experiment for identifying the good times. Once you learn to recognize happiness, you might be living the good times right now!